- The War's Indirect Intrusions
- Facing The War Directly 1968-1969
- A Harsh Yet Enlightening Interloper
- Release From the War
Brant Lippincott ’75 remembers that members of what then was the Community for Peace organized a protest march in April 1971. About a hundred students walked to the Springfield draft board, which they picketed.
Lippincott had been active for peace in high school and “was looking for some continued involvement.” He gravitated to other students who had been activists in high school or college.
They formed a politicized core that contributed to changes at Wittenberg. But campus attention to the war was not sustained.
A planned march in response to the February invasion of Laos was even called off. Torch’ writer John Mason ’71 reported on the grimly determined tone of the massive April 1971 Mobilization in Washington. Hugh Grefe ’73 and Kyle Bishop Grefe ’73 watched as antiwar veterans tossed their medals over the fence at the Capitol.
For all that, the campus was not mobilized. The Torch carried news of the war until the U.S. Peace Accord with North Vietnam in January 1973, and then until the fall of South Vietnam on April 30, 1975.
At Wittenberg, as for most other campuses, it was as though the war had ended in the summer of 1970. Troops were coming home, and there was a general sense that the war was winding down, if slowly.
Activists felt their concerns “trashed” by Nixon’s reelection in 1972, Lippincott recalls (the student body favored the incumbent), and they shifted to other activities. American ground war and the draft both ended at the outset of 1973.
By then antiwar protest had become mainstream, notably in the politics of the Democratic party and the orientation of the Congress. Antiwar sentiment characterized mainstream students, too; it was perhaps taken for granted, like the eventual end of the war.
What then was the impact of the war on Wittenberg? A few things seem clear. It helped to reduce campus isolation from world issues.
In Veler’s words, it helped students to “contextualize” learning and to bring social issues into relationship with each other. It helped forge a more mutual relationship between faculty and students, as noted earlier.
Specifically, the war stimulated programs such as East Asian studies and languages, as well as a more general international emphasis in the curriculum (for which Wittenberg won significant funding).
Having to deal with both apathy and protest led the faculty to play the roles of both stimulating and buffering social awareness. It helped the administration to clarify its position on student dissent.
No one has the last word on the effect of the war on Wittenberg. First, it varied from students to faculty and from person to person. For those active in antiwar protest, it could have a defining impact.
Patricia Cooper ’71 remembers hearing Malcolm Boyd speak in the chapel in November 1970, “and going back to the room with friends and saying that I had to go. I remember a kind of reversal.
I’d always acted out of fear and thought x would be wrong or y would be wrong, or what if my parents find out? Suddenly, it all switched. I remember feeling it would be wrong to stay at Witt when I had this opportunity to go on the demonstration.
So it was a huge moment for me, very important.” The impact of the war years was not limited to activists, as Pat McCubbin ’70, a former Torch editor, suggests: “even the spectators, I imagine, were changed by those years.
We would never feel the same about our government, our country, our social structure and justice, and we have been a part of the restless, untrusting, unstable years since. ...” Impacts such as Cooper and McCubbin mention are personal and largely intangible.
Second, the war coincided with other rapid changes at Wittenberg (as at other colleges and throughout the nation in general).
Some of those left institutional imprints — on race relations and diversity, social regulations and in loco parentis, women’s rights and roles, student rights and responsibilities, curriculum.
Other changes — in appearance and social behavior, for example — seem to have affected only the surface of college life. Both sets of change came together at Wittenberg about the time that the war intruded most on the campus, 1968-1970.
Nationally, the coincidence of war protest with other cultural changes contributed to the stereotype of protesters as “rebellious” and “hippies.” It was not that simple.
Rather, the war contributed a kind of intensity to other issues and developments — lines of change that transformed Wittenberg.
Charles Chatfield and Wittenberg Magazine welcome your thoughts and comments on these years at Wittenberg and those that followed. Please share them by writing to Wittenberg Magazine via e-mail at wittmagazine@wittenberg.edu or via mail at P.O. Box 720, Springfield, OH 45501.